Thursday, April 27, 2017

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, but don’t spend
your shiny new Trump tax cut just yet.

To update an old saying: There’s many a slip ‘twixt the lip
and the cut.

President Donald “Santa” Trump promises “the biggest
individual and business tax cut in American history.” So far he doesn’t have a
plan or even a bill in Congress.

The one-page outline the White House handed out Wednesday read
more like a campaign flyer than a legislative blueprint. It’s hard to argue
with any of these goals:

“Grow the economy and create millions of jobs. Simplify our
burdensome tax code. Provide tax relief to American families – especially
middle income families. Lower the business tax rate from one of the highest in
the world to one of the lowest.”

Briefing reporters, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and National
Economic Council Director Gary Cohn were short on details but long on -- irony
alert -- hope and change.

“We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to do something
really big,” Cohn told reporters.

“Under the Trump plan, we will have a massive tax cut for
businesses and massive tax reform and simplification,” Mnuchin said.

The lack of details gives Trump room to negotiate with
reluctant members of Congress. Democrats predictably blasted Trump’s proposal for
mostly helping himself and other wealthy taxpayers,

although he won’t release
his tax returns so we’ll never know how much. He’ll need support of Republicans
in Congress who traditionally have been wary of inflating the federal debt.

One provision left off the outline was a “border adjustment”
tax on imports pushed by House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., to help pay for tax
cuts. Putting the best face on the situation, Ryan said the White House was
“basically along the same lines that we want to go,” and Congress and the White
House were “moving and getting on the same page.”

Trump’s big idea is to cut the corporate rate more than 50
percent to 15 percent, reduce the number of individual tax rates from seven to
three, raise the personal deduction and eliminate most other deductions -- and
pay for it all through accelerated economic growth of 3 percent.

As Popeye’s friend Wimpy would say: “I’d gladly pay you
Tuesday for a hamburger today.”

President Reagan got his tax cuts and the economy did boom
for a while, although economists still argue whether Reagan’s tax policies were
responsible. Eventually Reagan raised taxes several times.

After President George W. Bush cut taxes in 2001 and 2003,
the economy never achieved liftoff, bumping along at an average growth of 2.1 percent
annually for eight years. The 9/11 terrorist attacks were partly to blame for the
sluggish economic growth.

Estimates of the cost of Trump’s tax cuts range from $3
trillion to $5 trillion over five years and up to $7 trillion over a decade. Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a
Responsible Federal Budget made the first estimate, The New York Times the
second.

While tax reform is a worthy
goal, said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a
nonpartisan group dedicated to fiscal responsibility, “it is inconceivable that
a tax cut of this magnitude could pay for itself through economic growth.”

The White House predicts “trillions” of dollars in new
revenue through growth. It’s worth remembering that Trump is unencumbered by fear
of more debt.

“I’m the king of debt. I love debt,” he said during the
campaign.

No doubt Republicans and Democrats alike would love to redo
the huge, complicated tax code with its Swiss cheese loopholes, and many people
would love to file their taxes on a “large postcard,” as Mnuchin put it.

But getting there won’t be easy.

Trump’s goal of eliminating deductions except for mortgage interest
and charitable donations faces stiff opposition from Democratic members of
Congress from high-tax states like New York, New Jersey and California.

Plus, it’s too early to know how Trump’s tax plan will
affect most Americans.

“We will be back to you with very firm details,” Cohn told
reporters. He didn’t say when.

Thursday, April 20, 2017

President Donald Trump took credit for a Democrat’s failure
to win a special election outright in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District,
forcing a run-off in June.

“Glad to be of help!” he tweeted Tuesday night.

But if you want a true gauge of presidential clout, watch
Congress as it wrestles with the prospect of yet another government
shutdown.

Americans have learned not to count on Congress to do much,
but keeping the government open is a modest expectation. That goal, however, challenges
Trump’s and congressional spending priorities.

Democrats have said no to Trump’s $1.4 billion request
to build a border wall. They’re also fighting his proposed $18 billion in cuts
to domestic programs to offset huge increases in defense spending.

Conservative Republicans still want to cut funding to
Planned Parenthood, but saving it is a Democratic priority.

All this matters because Republicans likely will have
to work with Democrats to avoid another government shutdown. Trump should help
make a deal, but, as we know, he’s unpredictable.

We’re here because Congress was unable to get its act
together last December and passed a continuing resolution or temporary spending
measure to avert a government shutdown. That spending authority expires Friday,
the day before Trump’s 100th day in office, which he’d rather spend
talking up his accomplishments than explaining why national parks are closed.

Congress went on a two-week spring break without
dealing with the spending issue. The Senate returns to Washington Monday and the
House on Tuesday, leaving a few days to negotiate.

The last government shutdown, in October 2013, dragged
on for 16 full days, and the one before that lasted 21 full days before it
ended in January 1996. Each cost taxpayers billions of dollars and caused major
disruptions in services.

“There’s not going to be a shutdown,” Senate Majority
Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, assured reporters the other day. These are the same
people who promised to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act on Day One.

Congress could punt again and pass another temporary
extension for a week, pushing the crisis into May, Politico reported.

Meanwhile, Republicans and Democrats are preemptively blaming
each other.

“Our Republican colleagues know that since they
control the House, the Senate, and the White House that a shutdown would fall
on their shoulders, and they don’t want it,” said Senate Minority Leader
Charles Schumer, D-New York.

Republicans need eight Democratic votes to overcome a
Senate filibuster, so Democrats are trying to use their leverage to stop Trump’s
agenda.

“I think Chuck Schumer and the Democrats want a
shutdown,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas and architect of the last shutdown, told
constituents in Texas the other day, the Texas Tribune reported.

This is rich coming from Cruz, who kept the Senate
floor for 21 hours in 2013 in a vain attempt to kill the Affordable Care Act, a
stunt that led to a budget standoff and then to the last shutdown.

Cruz’s antics demonstrated a truth about budget
brinksmanship and government shutdowns: They don’t work. An omnibus spending
bill passed, the ACA still stands, and Congress’ approval rating is a dismal 20
percent.

The cost of paying furloughed federal workers for not
working during the 2013 shutdown was $2 billion, according to the Office of
Management and Budget, which also cited such additional indirect costs as
uncollected fees, halted IRS enforcement measures and additional interest on
payments that were late, due to the shutdown.

No matter how they spin it, Republicans would suffer
political fallout of a shutdown. The stars haven’t misaligned to bring on a
funding gap under single-party rule since the troubled presidency of Jimmy
Carter.

Even if Congress manages to keep the government open
this time, another crisis looms in the fall, when the debt ceiling is reached.

The potential shutdown is a test. Trump could demonstrate
he cares more about governing than electioneering and support a compromise. Congressional
Republicans could show they have more aptitude for governing than squabbling.

As food trucks started rolling onto American streets a decade or so ago, states set health standards for them but left specific rules for mobile food vendors to cities and counties.

Now, faced with a complicated and sometimes conflicting system of local regulations, permits and inspections, some states are stepping in to cut the red tape.

In Utah, a new law that allows food trucks to move among localities with a single license goes into effect next month.

“As far as I know, we’re the first state to take this step,” said state Sen. Deidre Henderson, a Republican, who led the push for the statewide law. “Unlike most issues, this was difficult in that there were no states to model after.”

In Maryland, the Legislature passed a less-sweeping bill that is being reviewed by Republican Gov. Larry Hogan. A new law in Washington state requires all mobile food trucks to have a state permit and inspection. The law removed a previous exemption for trucks used outside the state for six months or more. Other state measures are more targeted, such as allowing mobile food vending in commuter lots in one planning district in Virginia.

In all, 13 states have considered 37 bills involving some aspect of food truck regulation since 2015, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). Only a handful of the bills became law, but none were controversial, said Doug Farquhar, NCSL’s program director for environmental health.

Some 4,130 food trucks operate in nearly 300 American cities, with each truck averaging almost $291,000 in revenue, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation.

“As we get more and more food trucks, we get to the point where states need to regulate this industry,” Farquhar said. Every state extended existing state health department rules for restaurants to food trucks, he said. But food trucks raise new questions.

“If you’re constantly out, where does the wastewater go and the trash? Those are novel problems you don’t have with a stand-alone restaurant,” Farquhar said.

A Booming Business

The U.S. food truck industry is one of the strongest food service areas, the market research firm IBISWorld reported in November. The industry grew nearly 8 percent a year from 2011 to 2016. But it is reaching its saturation point in many cities, the report said, with annual revenue growth expected to slow to 3 percent through 2021.

Still, restaurateurs worry about competition from mobile vendors parked close to bricks-and-mortar establishments, and some municipalities set parking time and location limits. Some, like a 30-minute parking rule in Sacramento, California, were later lifted.

In North Carolina, the Charlotte City Council last month revised its food truck ordinance, reducing permitting rules and allowing the trucks to stay open later and park closer to homes. But it added a rule that food trucks not be located within 50 feet of a restaurant without the owner’s approval.

Food truck owners complain that complying with myriad local rules is costly and time-consuming and hampers their ability to do business in multiple jurisdictions.

“We had very different regulations, often conflicting fire and safety regulations, and fees from county to county and city to city,” said Utah’s Henderson, who was approached by the Libertas Institute, a think tank in Utah that promotes free market policies, about the need for a statewide food truck law.

Utah has 29 counties and about 300 cities and towns. In West Jordan, a food truck license costs $1,400 and is good for only six months. The truck is prohibited from operating in the city the rest of the year. North Salt Lake requires license renewal four times a year — $800 in all.

Under the new Utah law, localities retain some control over when and where food trucks can operate, but they cannot ban food trucks entirely or charge high fees to generate revenue, Henderson said.

She conceded the law may need tweaks. One concern is how localities will collect tax revenue from mobile vendors operating in different locations.

“I hope we hit the mark, and I think we did,” she said. “We may make changes, but we’re off to a good start.”

‘There Should Be One Law’

Dave Pulford spent 30 years in the mortgage business before he started selling sliders from his UpSlideDown Dave food truck in Maryland five years ago. He expanded his menu to include full-size sandwiches, bought a second truck and is building out a third.

“Trucks like mine go to five different jurisdictions — Montgomery, Howard and Ann Arundel counties, the District of Columbia and Baltimore City,” said Pulford, who is also the president of the Maryland Mobile Food Vending Association. “I’d like to go to eight.”

But every license renewal “takes me off the road for a day, and I have to make up $2,000 in lost revenues and the $1,000-plus in fees,” he said. Each jurisdiction charges a different fee.

“Get a license in each locality? I get that. But there should be one law everybody has to follow,” he said, adding that caterers or restaurants in Maryland can operate statewide with one license.

“Am I a mobile vendor, a restaurant on wheels, a caterer? I think I’m all of the above,” Pulford said.

Last year, he talked about his business challenges with Maryland state Del. Warren Miller, a Republican whose grandmother happened to operate a lunch wagon at construction sites in Howard County after she retired from a school cafeteria.

Miller sponsored the bill requiring county health departments to issue a reciprocity license to any mobile food truck that holds a valid license in its home county and is operating within 90 miles of its base. The bill also limits the fee for the reciprocity license to $300.

“This changes the way food trucks are regulated. It puts the responsibility on the home county,” Miller said. “This means there are a lot more days in the year that the operator is out selling food rather than getting permits.”

The Maryland bill focuses on licensing and does not limit localities’ regulation of food trucks on their streets as Utah’s law does. For example, Annapolis, the state capital, can continue to ban food trucks.

Miller’s bill failed last year, but after a rewrite, the new bill sailed through both houses, slowing only so that more legislators could sign on as co-sponsors.

Both Miller and Utah’s Henderson said they worked with restaurateurs, food truck owners, local officials and health and fire departments in writing successful bills.

But reciprocity laws mark a new approach. And in Maryland, some officials worried that food truck operators will choose as their home county one whose rules are less stringent, but the bill allows local inspections.

Maryland bases its regulations on federal food safety law, meaning standards for food trucks are consistent in localities statewide, said Dr. Clifford Mitchell, director of the environmental health bureau of the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

The goal, he said, was to ensure all trucks in the state “operate in a safe fashion, follow the same procedures, and are equipped and appropriately managed.”

As food trucks started rolling onto American streets a decade or so ago, states set health standards for them but left specific rules for mobile food vendors to cities and counties.

Now, faced with a complicated and sometimes conflicting system of local regulations, permits and inspections, some states are stepping in to cut the red tape.

In Utah, a new law that allows food trucks to move among localities with a single license goes into effect next month.

“As far as I know, we’re the first state to take this step,” said state Sen. Deidre Henderson, a Republican, who led the push for the statewide law. “Unlike most issues, this was difficult in that there were no states to model after.”

In Maryland, the Legislature passed a less-sweeping bill that is being reviewed by Republican Gov. Larry Hogan. A new law in Washington state requires all mobile food trucks to have a state permit and inspection. The law removed a previous exemption for trucks used outside the state for six months or more. Other state measures are more targeted, such as allowing mobile food vending in commuter lots in one planning district in Virginia.

In all, 13 states have considered 37 bills involving some aspect of food truck regulation since 2015, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). Only a handful of the bills became law, but none were controversial, said Doug Farquhar, NCSL’s program director for environmental health.

Some 4,130 food trucks operate in nearly 300 American cities, with each truck averaging almost $291,000 in revenue, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation.

“As we get more and more food trucks, we get to the point where states need to regulate this industry,” Farquhar said. Every state extended existing state health department rules for restaurants to food trucks, he said. But food trucks raise new questions.

“If you’re constantly out, where does the wastewater go and the trash? Those are novel problems you don’t have with a stand-alone restaurant,” Farquhar said.

A Booming Business

The U.S. food truck industry is one of the strongest food service areas, the market research firm IBISWorld reported in November. The industry grew nearly 8 percent a year from 2011 to 2016. But it is reaching its saturation point in many cities, the report said, with annual revenue growth expected to slow to 3 percent through 2021.

Still, restaurateurs worry about competition from mobile vendors parked close to bricks-and-mortar establishments, and some municipalities set parking time and location limits. Some, like a 30-minute parking rule in Sacramento, California, were later lifted.

In North Carolina, the Charlotte City Council last month revised its food truck ordinance, reducing permitting rules and allowing the trucks to stay open later and park closer to homes. But it added a rule that food trucks not be located within 50 feet of a restaurant without the owner’s approval.

Food truck owners complain that complying with myriad local rules is costly and time-consuming and hampers their ability to do business in multiple jurisdictions.

“We had very different regulations, often conflicting fire and safety regulations, and fees from county to county and city to city,” said Utah’s Henderson, who was approached by the Libertas Institute, a think tank in Utah that promotes free market policies, about the need for a statewide food truck law.

Utah has 29 counties and about 300 cities and towns. In West Jordan, a food truck license costs $1,400 and is good for only six months. The truck is prohibited from operating in the city the rest of the year. North Salt Lake requires license renewal four times a year — $800 in all.

Under the new Utah law, localities retain some control over when and where food trucks can operate, but they cannot ban food trucks entirely or charge high fees to generate revenue, Henderson said.

She conceded the law may need tweaks. One concern is how localities will collect tax revenue from mobile vendors operating in different locations.

“I hope we hit the mark, and I think we did,” she said. “We may make changes, but we’re off to a good start.”

‘There Should Be One Law’

Dave Pulford spent 30 years in the mortgage business before he started selling sliders from his UpSlideDown Dave food truck in Maryland five years ago. He expanded his menu to include full-size sandwiches, bought a second truck and is building out a third.

“Trucks like mine go to five different jurisdictions — Montgomery, Howard and Ann Arundel counties, the District of Columbia and Baltimore City,” said Pulford, who is also the president of the Maryland Mobile Food Vending Association. “I’d like to go to eight.”

But every license renewal “takes me off the road for a day, and I have to make up $2,000 in lost revenues and the $1,000-plus in fees,” he said. Each jurisdiction charges a different fee.

“Get a license in each locality? I get that. But there should be one law everybody has to follow,” he said, adding that caterers or restaurants in Maryland can operate statewide with one license.

“Am I a mobile vendor, a restaurant on wheels, a caterer? I think I’m all of the above,” Pulford said.

Last year, he talked about his business challenges with Maryland state Del. Warren Miller, a Republican whose grandmother happened to operate a lunch wagon at construction sites in Howard County after she retired from a school cafeteria.

Miller sponsored the bill requiring county health departments to issue a reciprocity license to any mobile food truck that holds a valid license in its home county and is operating within 90 miles of its base. The bill also limits the fee for the reciprocity license to $300.

“This changes the way food trucks are regulated. It puts the responsibility on the home county,” Miller said. “This means there are a lot more days in the year that the operator is out selling food rather than getting permits.”

The Maryland bill focuses on licensing and does not limit localities’ regulation of food trucks on their streets as Utah’s law does. For example, Annapolis, the state capital, can continue to ban food trucks.

Miller’s bill failed last year, but after a rewrite, the new bill sailed through both houses, slowing only so that more legislators could sign on as co-sponsors.

Both Miller and Utah’s Henderson said they worked with restaurateurs, food truck owners, local officials and health and fire departments in writing successful bills.

But reciprocity laws mark a new approach. And in Maryland, some officials worried that food truck operators will choose as their home county one whose rules are less stringent, but the bill allows local inspections.

Maryland bases its regulations on federal food safety law, meaning standards for food trucks are consistent in localities statewide, said Dr. Clifford Mitchell, director of the environmental health bureau of the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

The goal, he said, was to ensure all trucks in the state “operate in a safe fashion, follow the same procedures, and are equipped and appropriately managed.”

Thursday, April 13, 2017

Not since President Bill Clinton went on his mea culpa tour in 1998 to atone for Monica
Lewinsky have so many politicians, public figures and corporations done
indefensible things for which they’re oh-so-sorry.

“I’m having to become quite an expert in this business
of asking for forgiveness,” Clinton commented at the time.

In the last month or so, White House Press Secretary
Sean Spicer, Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley, United CEO Oscar Munoz, Fox News host
Bill O’Reilly, and Pepsi, among others, have had to make public apologies.

Circumstances varied greatly, but the wave of
apologies shows the power of social media to record and broadcast misdeeds and
arouse anger. More telling, the need for apologies shows that even in our seemingly
anything-goes culture, words and actions still count.

Standards of decency and behavior still exist, and public
figures and companies cross some lines at their peril.

Exhibit A is Spicer’s preposterous comment at a press briefing
Tuesday that “even Hitler didn’t use chemical weapons” as Syrian President
Bashar al-Assad did. Spicer also referred to Nazi death camps as “Holocaust
centers.”

Amid calls for him to be fired, Spicer offered a
full-throated apology the next morning, calling his remarks “inexcusable and
reprehensible.”

“It is really painful to myself to know I did
something like that. I made a mistake; there’s no other way to say it,” he told
MSNBC’s Greta Van Susteren.

His quick and abject apology for an abysmal choice of
words may allow Spicer to move on and save his job.

Personal misbehavior often leads to prolonged apologies
by politicians trying to survive, a la Bill Clinton. But nothing focuses the
mind like potential jail time.

Bentley’s latest apology and resignation as governor Monday
came after he entered a plea deal in which he avoided jail in return for
pleading guilty to two misdemeanors involving campaign funds. The deal came as
impeachment proceedings were to begin and at the conclusion of a sex scandal
involving a top aide.

After videos of a passenger being manhandled on an
overbooked United plane went viral, CEO Munoz first backed up the airline and
blamed the passenger. Then, he apologized in email and on TV, saying he felt “shame”
and promising refunds to those who witnessed the “horrific” incident.

It’s possible Munoz felt shame before lawsuits loomed,
before calls for a boycott spread, and before United got hammered in China
because the mistreated passenger was Asian. But the tone of the response
certainly changed when the PR crisis worsened.

Apologies have to be done right or they can backfire. In
the 2006 Virginia Senate campaign, Sen. George Allen attempted to make amends
for using an ethnic slur to an Indian-American student who was videotaping
Allen’s rallies for opponent Jim Webb.

“I do apologize if he’s offended by that,” Allen said
of the student. The apology was seen as tepid at best, if not insincere. The
incident wasn’t the only flub in Allen’s campaign, and he narrowly lost the
election.

Fox’s O’Reilly ran into a buzz saw last month when he
made a crack that Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters’ hair looked like a “James
Brown wig.” It was hardly the worst thing O’Reilly is accused of saying and doing,
but going after a congresswoman’s looks is out of bounds. The comment
reverberated on the Internet.

“That was stupid. I apologize,” O’Reilly said.

O’Reilly, whose sponsors
deserted him in droves after several women accused him of sexual harassment,
has gone on vacation.

And then there’s Pepsi’s ad starring celebrity Kendall
Jenner defusing a stand-off at a generic protest by offering a police officer a
can of Pepsi. The ad was widely seen as insensitive and trivializing the Black
Lives Matter movement.

Pepsi first stood by the ad but pulled it hours later.

“Clearly we missed the mark, and we apologize,” said the
company, which apologized to Jenner as well.

Saturday Night Live mocked the ad as tone deaf. A non-controversial
ad would never have received the attention, which goes to show confession is
good for the soul, and an apology can be good for business.

Thursday, April 6, 2017

By MARSHA
MERCERYou’d have
thought the National Park Service won the lottery.

The photos of Interior
Secretary Ryan Zinke holding an oversized check with Tyrone Brandyburg, superintendent
of Harpers Ferry National Historic Park, looked like shots of a lucky lottery
winner with a gazillion-dollar bonanza.

But this check
to the National Park Service was chump change – or Trump change -- $78,333.32.

That’s how much
salary taxpayers have paid Trump since noon Jan. 20. To compare: Taxpayers have
shelled out an estimated $10 million on Trump’s visits to Mar-a-Lago.

Candidate
Trump vowed he wouldn’t accept a salary as president, but the Constitution
requires a president to be paid. The framers thought compensation would keep
the president independent and free of corruption.

Until now, only Herbert Hoover and John F. Kennedy gave their
presidential salaries to charity.

Trump
initially planned to make a splash by giving away his entire $400,000 salary at
year’s end. But the White House changed course and staged the photo op Monday
in the press briefing room.

Trump gave the
first installment of his salary to the park service, nearly everybody’s
favorite federal agency. The money will go towards repairing infrastructure,
Zinke said. But the sum will hardly make a dent in the $229 million backlog in
deferred maintenance on the 25 national battlefields. Overall, the
park service has a backlog of $12 billion in deferred maintenance on more than
400 parks and historic sites around the country.Trump’s budget
proposes a cut of $1.5 billion, or 12 percent, from the Interior Department’s
budget. It doesn’t specify how much will be cut from the park service.

So, Trump came
across not as a generous benefactor to the park service but as a latter-day
John D. Rockefeller, handing it a few shiny dimes.

Visits to
national parks have been growing over the past decade to a record high of 330
million visits last year during the service’s centennial celebration.

Most park
facilities were built in the early and mid-20th century and need
updating or replacing. These include rest areas and visitor centers, wastewater
treatment and electricity plants, staff quarters and campgrounds.

Congress has
long preferred to create new parks rather than take care of existing ones, but
addressing deferred maintenance may be a rare area of bipartisan cooperation in
the fractured Congress.

Last year,
Congress authorized an additional $90 million for non-transportation
maintenance and an additional $28 million for roads and bridges in the parks,
with funds rising every year for five years.

That’s not
nearly enough to tackle the enormous backlog, park service officials and fans
say.

Sens. Mark
Warner, D-Va., and Rob Portman, R-Ohio, introduced on March 28 the National
Park Service Legacy Act, which would direct $50 million annually in 2018, 2019
and 2020 for deferred maintenance at the parks.

The Legacy Act
would authorize increasingly larger sums until $500 million would be available annually
from 2027 through 2047. Costs would be paid through revenues from government
oil and natural gas royalties.

“Virginia
ranks fifth in the list of states with the greatest need for maintenance, with
a backlog of $800 million,” said Warner. Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia
is a cosponsor.

Republican co-sponsors
include Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who
wants to help the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which has a $232 million
maintenance backlog.

“The Great
Smoky Mountains National Park is one of America’s greatest treasures and it has
a tremendous economic impact on East Tennessee,” Alexander said.

The park
service does have its critics.

Sen. Rand
Paul, R-Ky., chairman of the Homeland Security subcommittee on federal spending
and oversight, has called out park service projects in Pennsylvania and Alaska
as wasteful.

While
congressional action is slow, there is something you can do: make a gift directly
to the National Park Service, or, if you prefer, to your favorite national park. Shenandoah National Park has a $90 million
maintenance backlog, for example, and Gulf Islands National Seashore has a $21 million maintenance
backlog.

Your gift,
like Trump’s, comes with a bonus. It’s tax deductible, if you’re among the 30
percent of taxpayers who itemize.